Quinn: We are what we read on social media sites

Frank Lloyd Wright reportedly said he could design a home so that a happy couple would get divorced in weeks.

Likewise, could different social media outlets turn us into grouches?

OK, we really don't live on Facebook and Twitter the same way we share a bathroom and kitchen with our loved ones. But we are rubbing elbows online, conveying emotions with every tweet and post. We think we are in control, but maybe the tone and tenor of our social media sites are in charge of us.

Each social network has a reputation of sorts.

Twitter has become the place for outrage and unhappiness, like complaining the cable guy hasn't shown up, according to one recent study by Chute, a content marketing startup in San Francisco.

Instagram, the photo-sharing site owned by Facebook, is more upbeat.

With both services, if a person attaches a photo, the post is four times more likely to convey a positive emotion.

"Twitter has become a customer support channel," said Ranvir Gujral, a co-founder of Chute. "There is something aspirational about Instagram, almost a desire to induce jealousy. Almost every selfie out there is from a positive moment."

Chute's findings dovetail with the firm's own business of helping companies cultivate "brand ambassadors" snapping photos of their new shoes.

But it turns out we aren't tweeting and posting in a vacuum. Moods are contagious not only in a household or office but also on social networks, according to researchers at UC San Diego.

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They found that rainfall in one city bums out people who see a person's rainy day Facebook post, even those sitting in sunny California.

"For every happy post you write, it causes your friends to write two different happy posts," said James Fowler, a UC San Diego professor of political science and medical genetics.

Following Fowler's work, another set of researchers experimented with whether they could change the tone of what a person posted on Facebook by limiting the positive or negative messages they saw.

The answer was yes; mind-control worked. Dialing George Orwell.

Even though happy posts are contagious, they don't spread as fast as angry ones, according to a study of 70 million posts on Weibo, China's version of Twitter, by researchers at Beihang University.

An angry post can influence someone three degrees away from the original poster, researchers found. (In other words, a follower's follower's follower.)

This is the sort of thing governments worry about and watch for -- anger spreading like wildfire via social media.

"The technology that has the biggest impact on society is the technology that connects it," Fowler said.

But it's something for us to be aware of too.

Do you sign off Facebook feeling happy and satisfied, having connected with friends and family, or do you feel something else?

A friend limits her Facebook checking to twice a day because she found she had a vague sense of dissatisfaction after spending time on the site. She wasn't sure if it was the upbeat tone in her news feed or the kinds of articles and videos people pointed her to.

Or maybe a friend of a friend forgot her umbrella on a rainy day in Singapore or Ouagadougou, the capital of Burkina Faso, and the mild sense of irritation spread worldwide.